The Dutch House (12 page)

“The trust is for you, and for Andrea’s daughters.”

“Norma and Bright?” Maeve almost went across the table. “She gets everything and we have to pay for their education?”

“You don’t pay for anything. The trust pays for it.”

“But not for Maeve?” I asked. That was the travesty, the part he didn’t bother to mention.

“Since Maeve’s already finished college, your father felt her education was complete,” Lawyer Gooch said.

Aside from that single lunch in the Italian restaurant in New York, our father had never talked to Maeve about her education, nor had he listened when she talked about it. He thought if she went to graduate school she’d only get married halfway through and quit what she’d started.

“The trust will pay for college?” Maeve asked. The way she said it made me realize it was one more thing she’d been worried about, how she was going to send me to college.

“The trust pays for education,” Lawyer Gooch said, enunciating the word
education
very clearly.

Maeve leaned forward. “All education?” They may as well have been alone in the room.

“All of it.”

“For all three of them.”

“Yes, but Danny of course will go first, being the oldest. I think there’s very little chance it’s going to run out. Norma and Bernice should be able to get through school just fine.”

Bright, I wanted to say and did not say. No one called her Bernice.

“And what happens to the money that’s left, if there’s any left?”

“Any money still in the trust when all three children have completed their education will be divided equally among the four of you.”

He might as well have said that half the money went back in Andrea’s handbag.

“And you administer the trust?” Maeve asked.

“Andrea’s lawyer set it up. She told your father she wanted to ensure the children’s education and from there—” He tipped his head from side to side.

“‘As long as we’re in the lawyer’s office, why not go ahead and put my name on everything you own?’” Maeve was giving it her best guess.

“More or less.”

“Then Danny needs to think about graduate school,” Maeve said.

Lawyer Gooch tapped his pen thoughtfully against a yellow legal pad. “That’s a long way off, but yes, were Danny interested in graduate education, the cost would be covered. The trust stipulates that he maintain a minimum grade point average of 3.0 and that the education be contiguous. Your father felt strongly that school was not to be a vacation.”

“My father never had to worry about Danny’s grades.”

I would have liked to have said something for myself on this point but I didn’t think either of them would have listened. My father cared nothing about my grades, though maybe he would have if there had been a problem. He didn’t care about my free throw as long as I sank it. What he cared about was how fast and straight I could hammer a nail, and that I understood the timing involved in pouring cement. We cared about the same things.

“Did you know I went to Choate?” the lawyer asked, as if his high school years were suddenly relevant to the conversation.

Maeve sat with this for a minute, and then told him no, she hadn’t known that. Her voice was surprisingly soft, as if the thought of Lawyer Gooch being shipped off to boarding school made her sad. “Was it very expensive?”

“Almost as much as college.”

She nodded and looked at her hands.

“I could make some phone calls. They don’t usually accept students in the middle of the year but given the circumstances I imagine they’d want to take a look at a basketball player with excellent grades.”

The two of them decided I would start Choate in January.

“Do you know what kind of kids go to boarding school?” I said to Maeve in the car after we left the office. My tone was full of accusation when in fact I’d never known anyone who’d gone to boarding school. I’d only known kids whose parents had threatened to send them after they’d been caught smoking weed or failing Algebra II. When Andrea complained to my father that I didn’t put my dirty clothes in the hamper, that I seemed to think Sandy was there to pick my clothes off the floor and wash them and fold them and take them back to my room, he would say, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to send him to boarding school then.” That’s what boarding school was—a threat, or a joke about a threat.

Maeve had other ideas. “Smart rich kids go to boarding school, and then they go to Columbia.”

I slumped down in my seat and felt very sorry for myself. I didn’t need to lose my school and my friends and my sister on top of everything else. “Why don’t you cut to the chase and send me to an orphanage?”

“You don’t qualify,” she said.

“I don’t have parents.” It wasn’t a topic we discussed.

“You have me,” she said. “Disqualified.”

“The study of trains?”

I smiled. It was spring again. In fact, it was Easter, and I was back in Elkins Park for two whole nights. The cherry trees that lined the Buchsbaums’ side of the street were pink and trembling, exhausted by the burden of so many petals. They turned the light pink and gold. This was the cherry trees’ day, their very hour, and I, who never saw anything outside of the hospital, was there to witness it. “The trains are almost finished. Orthopedics starts next week.”

“Strong as a mule and twice as smart.” Maeve dangled her arm out the window of her parked car, her fingers reenacting the memory of bygone cigarettes.

“What?”

“Haven’t you heard that? I guess it isn’t a joke orthopedists make. Dad used to say it all the time.”

“Dad had something against orthopedists?”

“No, Dad had something against cauliflower. He hated orthopedists.”

“Why?”

“They put his knee on backwards. You remember that.”

“Someone put his knee on backwards?” I shook my head. “That must have been before my time.”

Maeve thought about it for a minute. I could see her scrolling through the years in her mind. “Maybe so. He meant it to be funny but I have to say when I was a kid I thought it was true. His knee really
did
bend the wrong way. He used to go to orthopedists all the time, trying to get it to bend the other way I guess. When I think of it now it’s kind of horrifying.”

There would never be an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder. “Even if the surgeon put the knee on backwards, which, of course, isn’t possible, we should probably be grateful he didn’t amputate the leg. That happens all the time in war, you know. It takes a lot more time to save something than it does to cut it off.”

Maeve made a face. “It wasn’t the
Civil
War,” she said, as if amputation had been abandoned after Appomattox. “I don’t think they even did surgery on his knee. He said in France the doctors were in such a hurry that they didn’t always pay attention. Things got turned around. Really, it’s kind of touching that he could even make a joke about it.”

“He must have had surgery when it happened. If you get shot in the knee then somebody is going to have to operate.”

Maeve looked at me like I had just opened the car door and taken the seat beside her, a complete stranger. “He wasn’t shot.”

“Of course he was.”

“He broke his shoulder in a parachute jump and he tore something in his knee, or he jammed the knee. He landed on his left leg and then he fell over and broke his left shoulder.”

There was the Dutch House right behind her, the backdrop to everything. I wondered if we had grown up in the same house. “How have I always thought he was shot in the war?”

“I have no idea.”

“But he was in a hospital in France?”

“For his shoulder. The problem was no one paid attention to his knee when it happened. I guess the shoulder really was a mess. Then the knee hyperextended over time. He wore a brace for years and then the leg got stiff. They called it artho—” She stopped mid-syllable.

“Arthrofibrosis.”

“Exactly.”

I remembered the brace as being the source of the pain: heavy and ill-fitting. He complained about the brace, not the knee. “What about his shoulder?”

She shrugged. “I guess it turned out okay. I don’t know, he never mentioned his shoulder.”

All through medical school, and for at least a decade after, I had dreams in which I was in grand rounds, presenting a patient I had never examined, which was how I felt that Easter morning.
Cyril Conroy is an American paratrooper, thirty-three years of age. He was not shot . . .

“I’ll tell you something,” Maeve said. “When he had his heart attack, I always thought it was the stairs. I couldn’t imagine him trying to make it to the sixth floor of anything. He must have been mighty pissed off at someone to walk up a stairwell in that kind of heat to look at window sealing. As far as I know he only went to the third floor of the Dutch House twice in his life: the day he brought Mommy and me to see the place for the first time, and the day I came home for Thanksgiving and Andrea announced my exile. Remember that? He carried my bag upstairs. And then when we got up there he had to lie down on the bed. His leg was killing him. I put my suitcase under his foot to elevate it. I should have been screaming mad about Andrea but all I could think was that I was never going to get him down the stairs again. We were going to have to live in the two little bedrooms off the ballroom, me and Dad. It’s sort of a sweet thought, really. I wish we had. He said, ‘It’s a nice-looking house but it’s too damn tall.’ I told him he should sell it then and buy a ranch house. I told him that would solve every problem he had, and we both laughed. That really was something,” she said, looking out the windows at the Buchsbaums’ cherry trees, “getting Dad to laugh about anything in those days.”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

I wanted to work with my father, to buy and sell buildings. I wanted to build them from scratch, but that was gone. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play basketball.” I sounded petulant even to myself. Maeve would have loved to have had my problems, to explore the limits of how extensively and expensively she could be educated.

“Play all you want when you get off work at the hospital,” she said, and followed the signs to Connecticut.